Perfect doubling

The focus of this paper is the syntax of the so-called perfect doubling construction as it occurs in dialects of Dutch, namely cases of compound tenses featuring an additional, participial have (or be). We examine the properties of the construction on the basis of recent fieldwork research, and propose an analysis, whose starting point is the assumption that auxiliary doubling as such does not exist; what we have, rather, is the perfect tense of a lexical have (and be), which takes an adjectival (small clause) complement. Dialects vary with respect to the kinds of complement these lexical verbs can take. Our micro-comparative treatment takes into account related constructions, such as the geographically restricted so-called undative construction, as well as variants thereof that exist in the standard language. Keywords: syntactic doubling; (adjectival) participles; auxiliaries; present perfect; target state; resultant state; undative construction; possession